Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Disgusting Peasant Foods

Offa
Stinking brown jelly grown on wet rocks, poisonous until fermented, and fermented in pits. Served in shallow bowls and traditionally eaten with clamshells. Nevertheless a point of cultural pride in Koth.

Gosca
Watery gruel made from insect larvae (especially mosquito), harvested from bog-farms. Bog-farmers are widely considered the most wretched caste of farmers.

Jo Bread
Bitter, acidic, and hard as a rock. Manufactured in black discs that look more like construction materials than food. Absolutely inedible unless soaked in water for a few minutes. Families use specialized tea pots to simultaneously boil their tea and soak their jo bread, which is then eaten after the tea is completely drank. Rich people still use jo bread to add bitterness to sweet teas, but the jo bread is then discarded into the garden. Popular west of the Elterspine Mtns, especially among halflings.

Horlick
A soup made from boiling the hair of a garguark, which is sort of like a woolly horse that lays eggs. If made properly, the hair crumbles away and doesn't feel like hair in your mouth. Tastes like cigarettes and wet cats.

Yeggis
This is horlick with a garguark egg added in. Actually not that bad. Traditionally served in a leather pouch. If you want to flirt with a Fangolian in a tavern, you don't buy them a drink, you buy them a pouch of yeggis.

Scumbo
A broadly defined category of stews served in the Frogwash Swamp. Could be anything from crocodile to swamp chicken (large frogs) soaked in rum (in order to kill parasites) and then stewed with fruit and/or gilly moss. Traditionally served with a black stone in the stew, which is then set aside and reused for future stews (believed to prevent disease).

Rat on a Stick
A favorite among dwarves. The cultural equivalent of a New York hot dog. Many different varieties available, shaved and slathered in sauce. For a higher fee you can even buy rats that have been cooked into exciting poses.

Fermented Rat Milk
Also favored by dwarves. Typically drank in thimble-sized shot glasses (but can be ordered by the dozen) or tall vessels that look like test tubes with a rounded-square cross-section. Dwarves call it gorbly.

Bagman Soup
Impoverished elves (and bards and noise wizards) can sustain themselves in a forest of jungle by learning a spell called song of the bagman. It makes birds (who fail their saves) to fly into a boiling soup pot, and it only takes a couple of hours of singing to get a cauldron full of boiled songbirds. Mind the splashes. (The songful bagman is a monster from the Book of Mice).

Boiled Barnacles
(Un)popular all over the Sea of Fish. Restaurants will serve them with a chisel, mallet, and disemboweling fork, but hungry sailors just eat them with knives, rum, and cussing.

Bogglehead
Made from sharks that have died of a particular kind of skin disease (specifically a yeast). You'd think this would be rare, but you'd be wrong. Every half decade or so, millions of yeasty sharks will beach themselves along the eastern seaboard of Centerra's Great Continent and die. Peasants are quick to grab all of these fermenting sharks. If buried, bogglehead will stay edible for years to come. It's not uncommon for a family to have a stash of sharks buried in the backyard, saved for a rainy day. The name 'bogglehead' comes from the stupid expression that all of the sharks get on their face after they die of their yeast infection.

Spell of Prodigious Probiotic Fecundity
Sometimes wizards try to refer to this spell as satiety or nourish person but all it really does is makes someone's intestinal bacteria multiply prodigiously. This vast crop of intestinal bacteria then nourish the person as they naturally die and are absorbed by the intestines. Causes bloating, gas, heartburn, and small amounts of retrograde digestion.

Zaratan Hatchlings
The few remaining zaratan (island-sized sea turtles) return to the island of Worthless Zyro every 3 years to lay their eggs. Their eggs are no larger than a normal sea turtle's, but they do lay vast numbers of them. These eggs are promptly dug up by the people of Worthless Zyro and sold for pittances at the Happy Turtle Festival. Eggs are stored in cool basements, and 2 months later, when the eggs hatch, the Joyous Turtle Festival occurs, when all the baby turtles are fried and sold for a penny apiece.

Blevyek
Fangolians have bred Blevyek goats for generations, in order to bring out certain traits. These are small, hardy goats that violently vomit out their stomach contents if punched sufficiently hard the kidney. After being fed grass all morning, the goat's vomit is gathered in clay pots, and allowed to sit for 24 hours. (This allows the goat's stomach enzymes to break down the normally undigestable cellulose in grass.) The the grassy vomitus is made into a thick porridge. The goats get their name from the noise they make when vomiting.

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And just google 'worst food' or 'disgusting food' and you'll get a million other interesting things. It is worth noting, however, that the most disgusting foods are usually the most expensive (and therefore do not fall under the category of Disgusting Peasant Food).